WHAT’S AHEADRobert HoganChairman and PresidentHogan AssessmentsTulsa, Okla.scientific knowledge is political and serves theinterests of powerful economic interests (e.g.,climate change is a politically inspired hoax).Second, as society becomes more litigious, peopleincreasingly think like lawyers, and for lawyers,there is no objective truth, there are just more orless convincing stories to be told. Third, as politicsintrudes ever farther into everyday life, peopleincreasingly believe the world is composed of“alternative facts” and we are free to pick andchoose those that best suit our purposes.So what we see on a massive scale is radicalrelativism, where truth depends on one’sperspective and agenda. If taken seriously, thiswill lead to the end of scientific progress. Butwhat does it have to do with the future of HR?These trends call into question important “facts”on which productive HR processes depend.First, human nature is rooted in biology, andit changes very slowly. Specifically, this meanshuman motivation changes very slowly. Becauseleadership involves dealing with human motives,this means the principles of leadership changevery slowly—e.g., what Napoleon Bonaparteknew is still valid today. Unless, of course,knowledge is politically inspired ideology.

Second, much of what HR does concerns
talent identification. At its base, talent
identification is a special case of personnel
selection. There is one right way and many wrong
ways to do talent identification. The most popular
and the worst from an empirical perspective
is human judgment based on interviews. The
most defensible method from a legal and moral
perspective is well-validated psychological
assessment—a well-established process whose
principles have remained unchanged for 100
years. In my view, the big challenge for HR over
the next five years concerns remembering the
hard earned lessons of the past. To the degree
that HR pursues unvalidated gamified assessment
methods and forgets the lessons of the past, true
meritocracy will suffer and internal politics will
drive talent identification.

My experience and lots of data indicate that people are not very good at predicting the future. Rather than speculate onpotential HR challenges, I would like to discussan existing challenge that, if it went away, wouldrepresent significant progress.

The Nature of the Challenge

If we think about the history of the world since
the end of the last ice age ( 13,000 years ago),
we will see steady improvement in the quality of
human life. Advances in agriculture have made
food more plentiful, clothes have become more
functional, transportation has become more
efficient, communication has expanded its reach,
public health has improved, and life has become
easier. There have been costs, of course, primarily
to the environment and other living species
forced to cohabit with humans, but the lot of
common humanity has been transformed in ways
that would be unimaginable 13,000 years ago.

How can we explain this improvement in
our living conditions? It is probably not due to
improved practices in HR. The transformations
are the result of steady incremental
improvements in technology created by clever,
practical people who like working with things.
The first big leap forward was learning to use
fire, which allowed many new food products to
be cooked and consumed. Then people learned
to put edges on rocks to be used as cutting
tools. Four thousand years ago, people living
on the Black Sea learned how to smelt gold—a
surprisingly complex and tedious process. Early
engineers figured out how to make wheels, and
early horse whisperers put horses in front of
carts. It is easy to think that this accumulation of
technical knowledge led to human progress.

These improvements in technology were
cultural not individual; groups of craftsmen
shared observations and techniques and built
upon one another’s accomplishments. Culture
itself depends on certain assumptions: (1) the
external world is real; ( 2) truth depends on: (a)
observations that can be repeated (this kind of
wood burns quickly, that kind burns slowly); or
(b) what reliable observers tell you they have
seen. Progress also depends on believing that the
world is real and not something we invented to
amuse ourselves.

During the last 50 years, the definition of truthhas changed in popular culture. There are threesources of this change. First, stimulated by thework of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), many peoplebegan to argue that what authorities claim asThe Most Important Challenges forHR in the Next Five Years